She’s a familiar spectacle. A former starlet struck down in her prime by a D.U.I. arrest, a TMZ rant, or some combination of both. Britney. Lindsay. Amy. Superstars whose sullied reputations appear salvageable only by rehab, imprisonment or death.

A train wreck.

In her debut book, “Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why,” Sady Doyle, the founder of the blog Tiger Beatdown and a staff writer at In These Times magazine, reclaims her. “She’s the girl who breaks the rules of the game and gets punished, which means that she’s actually the best indication of which game we’re playing, and what the rules are,” Doyle writes in her preface.

As a result, the train wreck may also be one of society’s biggest hopes, who — despite our self-proclaimed admiration for “strong women and selfless activists and lean-inners,” as Doyle puts it — “might turn out to be the most potent and perennial feminist icon of them all.”

In a culture that explains away similar (or worse) behavior by men, the train-wreck phenomenon is amplified by new technologies in surveillance and social media, which track the transgressions of public figures in real time and replay them on endless loops. Yet Doyle is smart enough to know that the seeming novelty of the train wreck only masks her timelessness: She is the age-old “fallen woman” gone millennial.

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Lindsay LohanCreditStephen Dunn/Getty Images

Consider, as Doyle does, Mary Wollstonecraft. Today, Wollstonecraft is best known for writing “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” her 1792 political treatise advocating for the equal treatment and education of men and women in England. But after her death in 1797, her widowed husband, William Godwin, published a colorful biography that described Wollstonecraft’s two suicide attempts; her affair with the American speculator Gilbert Imlay; and the birth of their daughter, Fanny Imlay. The posthumous revelation of Wollstonecraft’s premarital sex began her downfall, rendering “Vindication” and its progressive gender politics suspect for more than a century.

After establishing that the proto-feminist Wollstonecraft was also our earliest train wreck, Doyle then includes an array of women who fit into her category, like Charlotte Brontë; Sylvia Plath; and Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist author of “SCUM Manifesto,” who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. Doyle is most expansive when she shows how other categories, like race, further restrict women’s identity, with the consequence that women of color are even more likely to be dismissed as train wrecks than their white ­counterparts.

In her treatment of Billie Holiday and Whitney Houston — two artists who, after years of struggling with drug addiction, broken hearts and rumors about their sexuality, died tragically — Doyle’s lineage is especially compelling.

But Doyle enters some shaky ground when she tries to include Harriet Jacobs, the abolitionist and former slave. Jacobs published her “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” under a pseudonym, in 1861, and Doyle believes that Jacobs’s story itself was “wrecked” by editors, fellow abolitionists and book publishers, who questioned its credibility largely because of Jacobs’s detailed account of being sexually harassed by her slave master, dismissing her narrative as fiction and putting it out of print until the 1970s. But Jacobs’s literary disappearance was also emblematic of another prejudice: For most of American history, it was the perspective of slaveholders rather than enslaved ­African-Americans that historians treated as a credible source. That changed only in the 1970s, with the publication of books like John Blassingame’s “The Slave ­Community.”

Doyle is more persuasive on her book’s ultimate heroine, Britney Spears, the quintessential good girl gone bad. With her shaved head, broken marriages and fights with the paparazzi, Spears lost custody of her children, had a string of uneven comeback performances and now, despite the success of her Las Vegas run, remains under parental conservatorship. Unlike Doyle’s other examples, Spears and her antics are usually seen less as a feminist apotheosis and more like its antithesis, a warning sign to America’s daughters to avoid the pitfalls that come with ambition and attention.

Yet this is exactly Doyle’s bigger point. The train wreck is “a signpost pointing to what ‘wrong’ is, which boundaries we’re currently placing on femininity, which stories we’ll allow women to have.” Spears’s career coincided with the emergence of new media platforms that gave us round-the-clock access to celebrity meltdowns. Young women now have even greater access to instant fame. And because nearly every minute of their lives can be recorded, their most mundane or traumatic moments are fodder for the world to endlessly consume and condemn.

Doyle reminds us that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge women in terms of degrading ­stereotypes or unrealistic expectations. “Women,” she writes, “are not symbols of anything, other than themselves.”

Salamishah Tillet is an associate professor of English and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a co-founder of the nonprofit A Long Walk Home.